“It really bugs the s**t out of me”: Marty Friedman wants the media to stop calling him an “ex-Megadeth” guitarist
Friedman reassures he still cherishes his history with the band.
Image: Terry Wyatt / Getty
Marty Friedman is tired of being labelled as “ex-Megadeth”, and feels it’s neither doing him nor the band any favours.
Though he still has a lot of respect for the group, and is grateful for his time in it, Friedman just wants to be recognised as a separate artist.
Appearing on the THAT Rocks! YouTube channel, Friedman explains (via Blabbermouth):“Of course, once I left Megadeth, the tag ‘ex-Megadeth’ was stuck to my name, and I understood that for about a year or two. And then I really, really wanted to cut that out because I was no longer in Megadeth and I was doing my own thing, doing other things not related to Megadeth at all.”
Friedman says he asked news outlets in the early 2000s to stop attaching the label to his name, but says his wish wasn’t often respected: “They ignored that a lot, but then as time went on, it started to get less and less, and I started to feel better about it.
“And then in the mid-2010s, a lot of places stopped completely putting that next to my name, because there was nothing I was doing even remotely related to Megadeth, so why put it in there?”
He concludes, “Of course, sometimes they even still do it now, and it just really, really bugs the shit out of me, because it’s not doing Megadeth any favours either. It’s not doing me any favours. It’s 25 years ago. They have their own band, and I’m the biggest fan of their band, and my thing is completely different from theirs.
“But sometimes you can’t control what the media does. But that still doesn’t mean that I don’t have a lot of love and respect for the band. Of course I do. We’re both doing separate things.”
Friedman released his latest record Drama earlier this May. You can stream it now.